The advent of computer technology has revolutionized the way in which people around the world communicate. One area in which computer technology has provided change is in word and text processing applications. The first typewriters and computer terminals, which still set standards for text keyboard layouts, such as the “QWERTY” and “Dvorak” configurations, and for computer text encoding including the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) and the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC), were invented and widely used in the United States, which continues to be the primary market for the introduction of such devices, and in which English is the official language. English is also both the most popular second language, as well as the second most popular mother language in the world. Written English uses the Roman alphabet with no diacritical marks (26 characters in upper and lower case: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y and Z). Most other languages that use the Roman alphabet use an extended version of such alphabet, where diacritical marks such as accents and umlauts, for example À, Á, Â or Ä, are combined with certain alphabetical characters that are also used in English such as A. The characters that are present on keyboards designed for the English language are also present in most keyboards designed for other languages, whereas the additional non-English characters vary widely from keyboard design to keyboard design, depending on the target languages (e.g., German, French, Italian, etc.). In a similarly limiting way, the first definitions of computer character sets, which specify how each character is to be stored in computer memory, did not assign codes to letters other than the 26 upper case and 26 lower case letters used in English. The most important of these first character sets, which are still in use today, are ASCII, where 7 bits out of 8 are used to store information, and EBCDIC, which uses 8 bits of data, and is based on IBM's earlier BCD encoding. In the ASCII set, the upper range of 128 codes having the 8th bit set was left undefined and unused. Similarly, in EBCDIC, certain blocks of codes were left unused. Over the years, both character sets have been extended in order to store certain non-English letters, either by replacing certain non-alphabetical characters with non-English alphabetical ones, or by assigning some codes which had originally been left undefined. As newer character sets were defined, these in general maintained backward compatibility with either ASCII or EBCDIC. Even newer 16-bit and 32-bit global character encoding schemes (e.g., Unicode) retain, for compatibility, the original subset of 7-bit ASCII codes. This illustrates how, both for the layout of text input keyboards, as well as for character encoding definitions, there is a subset of characters which is in large part both privileged and standard. This subset includes the 26 letters from A to Z, in upper and in lower case (a total of 52 alphabetical letters), the 10 digits, as well as certain spacing and punctuation signs, and other signs such as the “apostrophe” (ASCII decimal code 39), and the “grave” character (ASCII decimal code 96), which is very similar to the “apostrophe”. Neither the original ASCII nor the original EBCDIC character encoding set provide support for letters used in non-English languages such as Italian. This means that on systems that employ these character sets there is no accepted standard for encoding, for example all the accented letters used in Italian. Thus there lies a need for a text processing system that allows the accents and punctuation of a non-English language to be processed by an English based system using standard English based input devices such as a QWERTY keyboard.